This Site has Become a Live Show

This site has morphed into a live show at Village Theatre called Atlanta Explained. It’s hilarious, great fun, and includes some of the city’s finest improvisors. We do it the last Saturday of each month. Check The Village Theatre’s site for show times and tickets, or sign up to our mailing list at right to be notified. There’s also the twitters and the Facing Book, so pick your poison.

Here’s a video in which the show will be explained at you:

If you’re interested in why a web site has become a live show, there are lots of reasons. First of all, it’s fun. Writing for a web site, on the other hand, has declined in fun year by year for the five years and over 500 posts I’ve written for this site.

One thing I’ve noticed by comparing Facebook sharing information to our Google Analytics is that people react to a post — Maybe they like, maybe they share — based on the photo and headline. Very few click through from Facebook to read the actual posts that I and our writers spend hours working on.

That means we could just as easily be posting memes. But I don’t want to post memes. I am a writer. I want to write things.

With the live show, I get to write and perform material that gets heard by the people who attend. I like that feeling a lot more than firing off a post that gets a thousand shares on Facebook but only sees a hundred pageviews. Plus, I get to be around other funny people, which is why I started this site to begin with: to attract other humor writers.

I also don’t like the feeling of being at the mercy of Facebook. They’re not in the business of showing my content to anyone unless I pay them to. I’ve spent a few bucks here and there to promote posts, and I noticed a marked difference in how much money I had. There was zero change otherwise. But when people come to our show, I don’t have to beg Facebook for their attention. They’re already with us.

I don’t mean to say we’ll never post here again. Sometimes there are things in the news that itch at me so badly I have to satirize them. But it’s also hard to satirize in general, presently, because it’s impossible to be comically more outlandish than people who are actual leaders.

If you liked what we tried to do the last few years — namely, to poke fun at the things about Atlanta and Georgia that we think are worthy of being made fun of — come see our show Atlanta Explained at Village Theatre. The men and women who do improvisation there are a real treat to see in action. I think you’ll agree.

Editor In Chief, Founder, and Admiral of Smugness at The Atlanta Banana, Jim Hodgson has an ass for news. Follow him on twitter at @jimhodgson
He is the author of the hilarious Science Fiction novel Dangerous Dan, available now on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback.